[conviction]
I never planned to be a writer. It didn’t find me any more than I found it. I just stumbled around and I didn’t want to be a guy who worked in an office anymore and I was losing my goddamn mind anyhow.

I went to Washington DC and stayed with a friend at college and had a better time there than I did in my life in Texas. Do you know that feeling, when you’ve had your eyes opened to a world so much better than the one you’ve been living? I was eighteen, picture it, bored and friendless and depressed and suddenly I’m in this great city with people who took to me instantly. Picture it, right, but with the knowledge that it’s all on a two-week timeclock, after those two weeks punch out you’re back to flatness and even the buildings don’t vary the landscape, no skyline and nobody to talk to, and you can’t even bring it up to the people in this city because there’s nothing to say, it’s not like they could tell you to stay because there’s nowhere for you to be there, and you’re not really there. You move like a ghost, stepping through shadows to a world that isn’t yours. You can be visiting; you can be the guy who appears in town to say hello, have some fun. You can’t relocate across the country just to be a townie in some city that isn’t yours. The magic is in the fact that it’s fleeting.

Have all this in your head and have no one to talk to and have a notebook and have afternoons while everyone is in class all by yourself and try not to write it down.

I was losing my goddamn mind so I wrote it down. I came back after two weeks and wasn’t feeling a whole lot more stable, so I kept writing. I didn’t really stop for the next seven years, and somewhere along the line I guess I started to think that I was a writer, and somewhere along that line I became convinced that there was power in the act and the title.

I’ve wanted to do it all. Bastards still rule, you know, and I’ve wanted to write them out of power. I’ve wanted to inspire others to live their lives in ways that I have decided make much more sense, after all, and I wanted to figure out some magic combination of words that would make them realize that they had more power than they thought. I had so many things I wanted to do. It’s romantic, the idea of a pen and a notebook rolled into a back pocket as tools for conjuring. why do you think they call it spelling? I wanted to write the bastards out of the world, I wanted to write more beauty into it, I wanted to change everything. I wanted to change myself. I wanted to deserve the world I wanted to create.

[just rewards]
Hell. I was eighteen, maybe nineteen once I started taking it seriously. I wanted to get laid and a paycheck.

You know there was a time when I was convinced that the only money that was worth a damn was money that was earned through writing? It’s true, and I can’t even remember where that particular fucked-up notion came from. I read a book of letters William S. Burroughs wrote and they had some that he had written when he lived in the same damn part of South Texas that I was living in when I first took pen to paper and he was writing to Allen Ginsberg about a plan he had to use the cheap Mexican labor available in the Valley to turn a huge profit in a land-development scheme. It never materialized and I thought it was bullshit anyway. If he wasn’t going to earn his money with his talent, why not become an accountant?

I am twenty-four now and doing strange shit for money is not a new experience for me. At this point, I’m more surprised when I get a check from something that I’m not embarrassed to tell my parents about than I am when I get one for selling my body to science or allowing my genome to be mapped. Fuck it, you know, right? Money’s money, and it’s in such short supply that so long as I’m not blowing some dude in the back of his van or tapping the till at the local Circle K at gunpoint I don’t care much how I get it.

But for a time, it mattered. The validation I sought from writing was external. I wanted to get paid and laid, brother. I got both. I got paid for doing music reviews for a local ad-rag. Nobody much read what I wrote so I was free to type whatever bile was in my frustrated, black little nineteen year old heart. It wasn’t anything personal, you know, but try writing music reviews and not turning into some shithead with a keyboard who hates music. It’s part of the job description of a critic.

I’ve made a little bit of money now writing. In the past six years I’ve probably cleared somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand dollars as a professional writer. It goes fast, faster now than ever. So fast that it doesn’t even seem like much at all, especially spread out over that much time. Some of it was recently and some of it was a long time ago, but the point is that the money’s fleeting. I learned that when the writing gigs I had when I was nineteen all dried up on me one by one and it stopped being viable. Any time I get paid, I assume that it’ll never happen again. That changes the way you think about why you do what you do.

It’s funny now to think about how there was a time when I’d be happier writing garbage for money than writing something that I believed in if it meant I would be poor.

[unleashed]
I wrote a book called quiddity when I was twenty-one. People had always told me that they liked what I wrote because it was honest but I don’t think before that book I was ever really honest in my writing. It was all about reactions. people like reading honest writing, I thought to myself, so I will make this look honest. I was more honest in poetry than in any other format because I didn’t really understand it. My lack of sophistication bred sincerity. Otherwise it was funny, loud spoken word material because girls liked it and hackwork prose to get paid. I tried writing a novel; it was a paint-by-numbers rehash of high fidelity, standard neurotic boy outsider stuff.

But I wrote quiddity, and it was honest, and it sold all the copies that I had of it to sell, and it didn’t make me rich, or even pay for itself, but people still tell me that they like it. I learned a lot of important things.

You can’t write for a paycheck and still be a writer. There’s no two ways about it. There are great writers and there are writers who get paid and there are even some great writers who get paid but the paycheck has to be incidental. There’s a need for content, for words, that will always be there and there will always be people who are willing to bash together those words to get a paycheck. There’ll always be someone buying. But you can’t write for a paycheck.

When I figured out what I was doing wrong everything changed. I’ve never been a great writer, just someone who had a clever turn of phrase here and there and an interest in organizing thoughts so that they could be navigated on paper. It’s not talent, just some proficiency. But when I figured out why quiddity was different from everything else things became very clear.

Writing is truth-telling and fiction is journalism. That’s the secret, that honesty justifies the inherent deception in writing. No writing is rooted purely in fact but the best writing is the kind that uses the fictions that come with transcribing these ideas to illustrate the larger truths. Honesty. With yourself, with whoever is going to read it. Shaking off the desperate need to be received a certain way. Let it all come down.

[hell bound]
So I was nineteen, right, and I wrote for a magazine and I read poetry and put it in little chapbooks that sold lots of copies because I lived in the one place on the planet earth where no one had thought to do that with their writing before so I got to tap into an under-saturated market, the advertising majors would tell me. Some girls started paying attention to me.

One of them became my girlfriend, mostly because I didn’t think to not make her my girlfriend when she brought it up. And we were together for almost a year and I don’t recommend it if you can avoid it, you know, being with someone you don’t like very much.

But what’s interesting is that after we got together I stopped writing anything that wasn’t for the magazine. I was getting laid; I stopped writing anything that wasn’t intended to get me paid.

At the time I had all sorts of excuses. it’s because the coffee shop that i read my poetry at closed down, I told myself. i have nowhere to go to write anymore. and what would i say?

It didn’t occur to me until years later that I had stopped writing because the motivating factors had been removed. And so I was miserable, because I had started writing as a way to get things out of my head and then I had nothing in my head to get rid of and it was never about honesty and I was so dishonest with myself for so long that I hadn’t even realized that I didn’t like this girl enough to be with her, and she would talk about getting married and the whole time I just wanted to back up as far as possible.

And I did, eventually, and I wasn’t all that nice about the way I ended it, and there was another lesson in there that I wouldn’t get until years later. That if you’re writing about yourself, you’ll find that you make a more compelling character if your lead is a bastard. I figured that out right around the time I wrote quiddity. Once I figured it out, I tried my best to re-cast myself into a different role. I never wanted to take the easy route.

[life of the party]
I tried to break up with the girl a couple times, and it never really worked, and eventually I let her do it one night, late at night, over the phone.

why don’t you want to see me? she asked. I don’t remember what I said. Some bullshit answer. She got the hint, that I wanted out but was too chickenshit to actually say the words, and she choked back some tears and said i don’t know if this is working. And I pounced on that, went with it. i don’t either, I said, my own voice decidedly unaffected by such emotion. And in the end, I managed to get her to break up with me. For about two hours, I even had the gall to act like I’d been dumped.

It didn’t take. First break-ups never do. She wrote me letters, called me late at night, left envelopes on my doorstep filled with letters and hand-written excerpts from her favorite books about love, thinking they’d move me. They didn’t, not even the phone calls, but when she was crying I’d agree to meet her somewhere anyway.

I get the psychology behind it. Her perspective on it. he can’t stand to see me crying, she probably thought, it means he cares about me somewhere deep down. I cared, sure, but not in the way she wanted. Guilt, at most. I would agree to meet her so she would stop crying and then she would ask me to get back together and I would say no and she would start crying again and I’d say we can give it a shot. Cycle through it a handful of times — I break up with her, she takes it badly, we try again, I break up with her. It took about three weeks before the break-up stuck, and then the letters started again. I threw most of them away because I didn’t know what else to do with them.

And I started writing again.

Well, shit. I had to, right? I wasn’t getting laid anymore. what else can a poor boy do except sing for a rock and roll band? I started writing again, started reading poetry again. I wasn’t in school and I worked for a magazine in an office that was really the editor’s apartment. My entire dating pool consisted of a graphic designer named Jon and my editor’s wife. I booked a weekly open mic at a local coffee shop and hosted it. Girls came. My plan was diabolical and foolproof in its simplicity.

I was a pretty mediocre person then, and I fooled myself into thinking that it just made me way more intense, man. I looked up to people who were mediocre, taking from the things they wrote the exact wrong things. You can misread Bukowski really easily, especially if you’re a twenty year old boy looking for validation. I decided at one point that I would sleep with a girl who had the same name as every name listed in the song “Fuckin’ U Right” by Xzibit. samantha, loraine, monica, veronica, pamela, linda, keisha, nicole — extra points for the ones who had a line after their name. veronica — she treated my dick like a harmonica. nicole — had me fuckin’ while i was drivin’ on cruise control.

Maybe my only saving grace was that none of us believed that it was any more than what it was. I never got all that far down the line, either.

It’s not a period of my life that I look back on with any real pride, but I’m not ashamed, either. I’ve been both proud and ashamed of it from time to time, but it was all so early in my development into who I am now that I don’t give it much thought. Except now, except tonight, when I’m looking back at a lot of things, trying to put it all in perspective. Fundamentally, that was a different me.

[the cautionary tale of numero cinco]
The me I was at twenty was a different person than the one who wrote quiddity. Neither of them is the person I am now.

I changed more in the two and a half years since I moved to Austin than in any since adolescence. I came up with an idea to put it all in perspective. I’m a fan of perspective, especially when without it things are moving too quickly to have a grip on who you are and what’s happening.

I started to think of my life as seasons. Not Autumn to Winter. Seasons of a television series. It sounds silly, I know, but it works. What the fuck?

I broke it down into five seasons. The same length, in terms of the experience they cover; they all have to change dramatically. They all have a cast.

Season one involved moving to Austin, settling in, making friends. The cast was simple. Me and the people I moved with, plus the first friend I made in Austin. Carl, Fernie, Cindy, and Ashton Kutcher as Dan. The show was about living in a new city, working in a bookstore, meeting people, dating, writing as much as possible.

Season two introduced Tony and Kat and Erin and Fernie left the show. It had a plot, beginning to end, where Dan falls in love with Kat and spends the first half of the season trying until they don’t end up together and this ends up spurring him on to greater success in other endeavors, using their story to make more money as a writer by proposing it as a movie to a director who pays him to develop ideas.

Season three introduced Ani to the show and began with Dan unemployed and making the scene about town. The Ritz on Thursday nights and performing twice a week and writing his novel. It ended with Carl and Cindy leaving and nothing being quite the same, with Dan’s money gone, with no real idea where the money was going to come from in the future, with Dan putting behind him, forcefully and finally, the girl who he had lost who had put him on the path to Austin in the first place.

Season four was just Dan and Tony and Kat and Ani and there was a new love interest and it never quite gelled, they never had the right kind of chemistry. Dan went on tour for a few weeks and wrote poems about her and sold his body to science and Erin was still on the show, just not every episode anymore, and mostly everyone who was a fan of the show in the first three seasons started to get bored with it because a lot stopped happening and most of the favorite characters had left. It ended with Dan and Tony about to leave town for a long damn time.

Season five took place on the road and it was just Dan and Tony and Kat in the regular cast. It was a Bold New Direction and it was a show about traveling and best friends and phone calls home that kept taking on more and more significance and the way that sometimes the people you’re furthest away from physically end up being the ones you’re closest to emotionally. The regular cast was so small and new characters recurred, Matt in an early and a late episode, Morgan throughout the season, and eventually Dan came home and the payoff that the viewers had been waiting for since season two happened and Dan and Kat were together when he got home and everyone who hated the fizzled romance in season four got to see it written out like it had been a bad dream.

There’s an actual point to all of this and it’s that if I use this as a way of measuring the growing and changing I’ve done since I moved to Austin, I’m on the sixth season now. And it’s the last season of the show; there’ll be endless spin-offs, but there’s not even any guarantee that they’ll have the same sweeping, life-changing effects on the characters. And that’s scary, but what’s scarier is season five, and the way that it’s easy to start thinking about life as story.

See, toward the end of that period of my life, I had figured out what season six was going to be. pointed, pained introspection and isolation; our hero learns how to fully be alone, how to push forward in new directions, how to atone for any of the guilt he had left for the sins he’d committed before the show even started. It was a time to live an alone life.

And it didn’t work out that way, despite the planning for the arc of the show that had been laid out since the fourth season. Halfway through the sixth season, the main character was supposed to leave town by himself one night to live in Memphis. Instead he’s damn near finished with it and he’s moved in with the love interest from season two. It’s important to realize that there are better things possible than just the things you think you’ll end up with.

It’s important for any writer to realize that he’s more than a character in his own life.

[lineage]
How else are you supposed to think about it? All my favorite writers are diarists. Bukowski or Eggers or Fante or London or Thomspon.

And maybe it wasn’t even so much that I had to stop thinking of myself as a character in my own life; maybe it was more about not thinking about myself as a character in their stories. The point is that all of this is uncharted territory. There’s no part of the story arc that was supposed to be this way. It requires a lot of thinking on your feet.

Fundamentally what changed is the idea of why and how and what to write. Experiences recounted are not noteworthy; how could they be? Everyone has them. So few of our stories are brilliant enough in themselves to be worthy of the treatment a writer will give them.

It comes back to truth. Telling the truth, and honesty. It’s true to write today i went to the store but it isn’t worth anything. The fundamental change for me was that I realized that there’s more honesty in a lie that reveals emotion than there is in a truth that tells you nothing. I didn’t have to be limited to the honesty of fact that was Quiddity. There is more truth out there to explore.

If you ask a comedian what the difference is between the great ones and the ones who never rise above funny they tell you that the great ones are more concerned with truth-telling than jokes. It makes sense, especially for a comedian. The world is funnier than the best joke.

If that’s true, then the world is also more interesting than the best story. Stories left unwritten, a woman who drives to the supermarket, a man who shoots a deer, a boy who stays home from school, all of them have more potential for greatness than any convenient fantasy. The job of the writer is to find the truth in the fact. And to dismiss fact when fiction is more true.

[destiny]
I’ve stopped performing at different points since I started taking it seriously. I didn’t touch a mic from a few months before my twenty-first birthday until I was halfway to twenty-two. I put it down again after I sold through my run of Quiddity after moving to Austin, didn’t pick it up again except once every three or four months until the the tail end of season three.

I stopped performing when I was twenty because I lost my venue again and anyway, I had a new girlfriend and so that motivation was gone and her name wasn’t in that Xzibit song so maybe I didn’t need to do that to meet girls.

When I started again, months later, the girl was gone but that wasn’t the motivation anymore. I didn’t want a girlfriend, didn’t want to get laid, didn’t want to start another list of names that didn’t mean anything. I just wanted to talk about it. I just wanted an outlet.

It’s the same reason I started writing, and it’s why those journal entries I wrote in Washington DC at eighteen were more important and honest than the body of work that followed for most of the year afterward. I started performing again as a slam poet, even though I’m not a very good one, and I kept doing it every week for damn near a year because where the hell else was I going to put myself, right? And by the end of it I still wasn’t much of a slam poet but maybe some people thought that I was okay for what I was and I felt good about it because at least I got up there and told the truth. Even if the truth is just about loneliness, and anger, and wanting more. That’s a truth, too, and it’s valid if you can say it with conviction.

When I stopped again it was because I didn’t have those same truths to express. I was living in Austin and I had friends and I had some money from time to time; I didn’t feel abandoned and the more I wanted wasn’t an ineffable yearning that I didn’t know how to express. I wasn’t driven to tell the same truth and I hadn’t figured out yet how to tell a different one.

[harm's way]
It’s scarier to be honest about the bigger ideas. You can get on stage, write a book, say i am scared and alone and not satisfied with what i have and people will respond. It’s mathematic; people will hear you say that and say to themselves, i understand the way he feels because i feel it too. Expressing those truths are important but they’re also entry-level. You start there; you can’t stay there. Even the truly self-obsessed had to move on at some point, even Bukowski’s last couple books weren’t about how fucked up he was. Without the ability to get past it you’re Trent Reznor at forty saying the same things that he did at twenty-five, just less frequently because how many iterations of i’m sad and lonely and it makes me mad are there anyway?

You feel like a sitting target when you try to talk about the bigger ideas you have. There are greater rewards for it; if people respond to them then you feel a greater connection, you feel something more than just not being isolated. Because you can shake off the isolation and still not be satisfied. We are creatures capable of considering these big ideas, so to leave them out of the things we write and talk about will not make us complete. Knowing that you’re not the only fuck-up is good; knowing that you’re not the only fuck-up who thinks some people are actually aliens is better. Or something. You know? It doesn’t matter what the bigger ideas are; it just matters that they come from somewhere outside yourself.

[soul purpose]
And back when all of this started, I thought solipsism was a noble way of life that expressed an ironclad truth, but I only thought that because Henry Rollins had a book called solipsist.

Eventually there’s a question you have to answer before you can continue. You do these things, you find yourself on the noble warrior’s path, you fight for truth and justice and you use your words as weapons and you believe that they really do have power. Eventually you have to figure out what it is you’re trying to do.

It took me a long time to even consider the question. I was doing it because I had to, remember? And I read an interview somewhere with some famous writer, a young one, maybe it was Jonathan Safron Foer, who said i write to ease my loneliness. And I giggled a little bit to myself. oh, poor johnny! he’s lonely! poor lonely johnny! And, um, I wrote to ease my loneliness too, and he’s only like a year older than me so it’s not even like he’s so much smarter and should know so much better. It’s just that you can ease the loneliness and still feel like you’re not fulfilling any real purpose. Single moms and pregnant teens get asked why they’re having babies and they say i just wanted someone to love me. If you don’t want to be lonely, I don’t know, go play role-playing games or something, get a posse together and slay some orcs. There’s more to it than just not being lonely.

Mother Theresa said loneliness is the leperosy of the west and, hell, it’s Mother Theresa. Woman knew from leperosy. Easing loneliness is important and maybe the hope is that by easing your own you’ll ease the loneliness of others, but it’s too easy to see it as a solipsistic endeavor.

[damage]
Me at twenty-one. I work full-time in a comicbook store and don’t have any friends. I live with people I don’t socialize with, write the same angry poem about a bad break-up over and over again. My only friend is a guy named Don Rex who’s in his mid-forties and doesn’t cut his hair or his beard and he’s proudly mentally ill, likes to talk about it. Comes into the comicbook store every Saturday and my boss is convinced that he’s the weirdest dude on the planet and the first time he comes in he tells me to watch him to make sure he isn’t stealing anything, that he doesn’t trust him.

I talk to Don and he’s okay, weird as hell but I like weird. He’s there with a little bit of extra money in his pocket because his drug dealer’s out of town and so he’s going to buy extra comics. He hates superhero comics, wants fucked-up small-press books and I like that stuff and we hit it off, recommend things to each other. He leaves the store and my boss is stunned, the dude actually spent some money and wasn’t I creeped out?

He becomes my friend, and I quit the job and he calls me every Wednesday to talk about the comics that came out that week. I need a job and he gets me one on his construction crew. I realize that he’s my only friend because I didn’t want to have friends and I’m his only friend because I don’t offer him any judgment. He’s a painter, shows me the work he does, a huge series painted on record albums that he lay gesso over because he didn’t have the money for canvasses but he had plenty of record albums. He’s a carpenter and he built huge frames to hold the multi-piece painting he did with all of the different painted squares of albums. He’s trying to get his favorite comic artists to do a series of trading cards illustrating various mental illnesses. We talk about art and comics and he likes the idea of being a mentor and I like the idea of having one. I quit working construction and go back to the job at the comicbook store and he comes into the store again, my boss is glad because now he’s spending money again.

When I move I quit the store one more time and before I leave I give him a copy of quiddity. He reads it, calls me up the next day. it’s funny, he says, that i been talking to you every week for months and i never knew we had more in common than just liking the same comics and being interested in art. we might as well have had the same name, reading your book. i thought all these things, too.

And it’s funny, yeah, because I knew the guy for almost a year and we were friends and maybe that loneliness we both were dealing with didn’t really get eased till I wrote the book and he read it.

[you're welcome]
So I moved to Austin about a week after Don calls me after reading quiddity and I tell him I’ll write him, keep in touch. I never do, though I go so far as to buy postcards with George Herriman krazy kat panels on them that I never write anything on and never put in the mail.

And maybe I didn’t need to write to Don because I didn’t feel lonely anymore and as interesting as it all was I became friends with a mentally ill forty-four year old man because I was celebrating loneliness and living story and eventually I wrote a book called poplife and put Don in it, playing the same role to the lead character that he played for me, and I’m proud of the book and the theme of it is that living as a character isn’t going to get you what you want, and I’d never have written it if I hadn’t had a confluence of people in my life at different times, Kat and Don and Jonathan, if the story hadn’t been one I could hang on these people.

And I live with Kat and I see Jonathan every month or so but I never really did do anything to say thank you to Don for helping me figure out enough of life to turn it into story. And I don’t know how I’d even find him to do it, but the point is that I was living for story and ended up finding that the story I thought I was living wasn’t the one I wrote. Follow? I thought it was about being so desperately alone that you find someone even more desperate and alone to form a friendship with and instead it turns out that the desperation and loneliness exist as a guidepost, a map telling you where not to go. That it’s all ultimately things you can’t plan, and you can’t count on them to ease your loneliness. That isn’t a good enough answer as to why you do it.

[why we fight]
I’m no revolutionary, but every revolutionary act is an act of love.

I stopped writing again for a little while after Kat and I got together. It was expected, but uncomfortable. I don’t stop, not at this point. I’m not in it for money and I’m not in it so girls can see how intense yet sensitive I am through my mighty poetry and offer themselves to me. I expected I might stop because I didn’t know what else I was doing; the bottom fell out of the narrative.

I faked it for a month, wrote a poem or two and told myself I was going to focus on screenwriting. Poetry’s what I do with my time and screenwriting’s the only thing I found that could pay the bills. I didn’t have much to say in the poems and I realized that I don’t like screenwriting.

The bottom fell out — this was the time for intense introspection, for further isolating myself until I ended up alone and living in Memphis in a house by the river, working on a tortured, intense novel whose main inspiration would be crushing loneliness. That was the plot.

I had to figure out what this time was, since I knew what it wasn’t.

I had to figure out why I did what I did, since I knew why I didn’t.

Love.

[smile time]
I spoke of love when I performed. poplife is an exploration of the different kinds and the way we realize its effect on us. I spoke of love and of building a better world, of making it for ourselves. I spoke of honesty. the only thing we have to offer another person is complete honesty, I said. I read a sad poem about love that wasn’t and said that I knew that this honesty could lead us to a better world forged in love.

The character I was to play was growing increasingly fractured, but what the fuck? Fractured characters are fun, compelling. he speaks of building a better world through love, but his own life is spent alone, isolated.

It wouldn’t have worked. I’d burn out, start faking it. Grow bitter. Disillusioned. Rant about love and these ideals but I was tired by the time I came home after talking about it for three months, seeing hopes dashed on election day. I needed to figure out why I believed it.

Love!

This time in my life was to be spent alone, but it’d have been a diversion that wouldn’t have fit the theme. I’d have written a lot but it wouldn’t have said anything I wanted to say.

This time wasn’t for that; it wasn’t for writing a lot, for touring and talking about love and a better world. I wouldn’t be qualified. How can you really talk about love when you haven’t got it?

This time in my life was to learn why these are the things I have struggled through poverty to say. Season six: our hero learns why he bothered all along. The bridge between the political and the personal never seemed as real to me until I crossed it myself. I wanted to speak, to write, to tell the truth, because I was in love and I wanted to build a better world where everybody else could be too.

Make no mistake: this is the point. This is what we are here for. We can not live in a better world without love. And I couldn’t even talk about it with conviction unless I was able to see it myself.

[a hole in the world]
I’ve been with Kat for over five months now, and I’ve been writing a lot for the last two of them. It came back, and I knew it would, so long as I didn’t force myself to make writing take precedence over living.

When I first stopped writing I panicked; my meager, fleeting talent has finally left me, I thought, maybe i am only to write when i am alone and tortured, happiness no muse for a paragon of intensity such as myself. I was happy but terrified. There was a hole in the world.

It came back, and I knew it would so long as I stopped believing that it wouldn’t, so long as I realized that this was still time that I was living and that it still had significance too. I would just have to figure out what it was. I did, and it came back, and I have a clearer understanding of myself and what I am trying to say than I ever have before; the hole in the world has been filled with something I didn’t know for sure existed.

[shells]
I decided to leave Austin before I had a clue where I would go, what I would do, why I wanted out. I decided to leave Austin regardless of the circumstances. It just happened that the circumstances that exist are the best possible.

I came to Austin desperate after fourteen bad months in San Antonio that culminated in quiddity, the written manifestation and rejection of the worst time in my life. I came prepared to embrace the new, to live better and freer and to be open, to shed the skin of the neurotic boy outsider and play a role I’d written for myself. goodbye, neurotic boy outsider. hello, man of action! Our endless capacity for self re-invention is our strongest social attribute.

Two months after moving to Austin I self-applied the title man of action! because it was bold and dumb and over the top and I love bold and dumb and over the top. I could hear David Lee Roth say it in my head and it sounded righteous. I made the conscious shift because there was a girl I had been seeing for about a week who called things off, and neurotic boy outsider-Dan would accept it, and mope, and write about it in his fucking journal, and eventually move on like always. And that’s boring, so instead I told everyone I knew that I was now a man of action! and I left a vase full of flowers on her porch with a note attached and we ended up getting back together for another week before we finally both realized that active or passive, it wasn’t going to happen.

But now I had a big, bold role to play.

I stuck with the man of action! role, kept it alive in my head for a good year and a half, before I realized that it was just another role I was playing, even if it was one I wrote for myself. I wrote poplife as a way of rejecting that idea. The main character in the book calls himself man of action! too and at the end of the book he realizes that trying to be the man of action! is keeping him from actually taking people for who they are instead of for how they fit into his narrative.

I still use man of action! these days, but it’s just the title for my one-man show now.

[underneath]
I decided to leave Austin two days before I was going to be leaving for a few months anyway. I got a tattoo of the Alamo on my arm and knew that Texas was no longer a permanent part of my life. The only person I told that I was not going to stay when I came back was Kat, and she wasn’t my girlfriend then.

I had decided on Memphis because it would be good for the character I was playing in my head to go there. Jeff Buckley went to Memphis after he couldn’t figure out what he was doing in New York. Ryan Adams did the same thing after his band broke up. I was feeling in Austin like my band had broken up, just a little more alone then I was used to, a little more alone than I had been since I moved to Austin. And if I could be so alone in Austin then I didn’t really need to stay.

I never told anyone except for Kat any of this, and I don’t know why I picked her to tell except through hindsight. I told her two days before I left town that I wouldn’t stay when I got back and of course I had no idea that when I figured out where I was going to go and that it wouldn’t be Memphis that she would be coming with me, that it would be a we decision. Of course I didn’t know.

I toyed with Memphis, but every town I went to after I left Austin I could see being home. I thought New York for a while, I thought Albuquerque and San Francisco and Portland and Montreal. I just needed something new.

I eventually told Tony a few days after New York City that I was done with Austin. It felt good to say aloud to someone else, to not keep it below the surface. I kept telling people and that’s the way I accomplish anything. I tell people that I am doing bold things and then I have no choice but to do them; I told them I was going to finish a novel at twenty-three and I had to, I told them I would quit my job and I had to, I told them I was moving to Austin in the first place — my motivation and work ethic stems from a fear of embarrassment.

And by the time I got back to Austin it was not a shock to anyone who knew me that it was temporary, that I would stay for another half a year to say goodbye and to have another taste of one of those green summers and midnight movies, but the clock would be ticking. Wherever I was going, Memphis or New York or Montreal, I would go after that last Austin summer.

I had just assumed that I would be going alone.

[origin]
This is a story about a girl named Katherine and a boy named Dan who met one day when they worked at a bookstore together.

This is a story about how they fell in love and how neither of them was in a place to be in love with the other, how they each played roles. How Dan tried to be the full-speed-ahead man of action! that he made himself out to be in his head and how in reality that doesn’t work because other people decide how they’re going to live their lives.

This is a story about how what they did have was strong enough that they overcame awkwardness and embarrassment and managed to continually grow closer, to remain in each other’s orbit, to let love change and not try to make it something that it wasn’t, to not try to force their own definitions on it. This is a story about how love was defined against its shadows, about how time proved the sincerity of what love was by showing them both what it wasn’t.

This is a story about circumstances falling away and being actively changed and the way forces, physical forces, not metaphysical ones, not fate and destiny but magnetism and gravity, can draw people together at a time that feels inevitable.

This is a story about love, but then, it has been from the beginning.

[time bomb]
Before I left town I spent three days in a row with Kat. We hadn’t seen that much of each other since we both worked at the bookstore, before a kiss that came eighteen months too early. We ate at restaurants and in my apartment, we walked around the city with friends and took buses to meet each other around town. On the second day we were in my apartment and I was packing my bags and she was helping me and I told her about Memphis, how I wouldn’t be coming back to stay.

Later that night we went to a party and her boyfriend was there and so were so many of the people who we had worked with at the bookstore, and it was all so strange and the next day, in the hours before I left town, we ate lunch together one last time and when I walked her back to where she was going afterward I hugged her goodbye and managed not to kiss her. It was still too early.

We talked on the phone almost every day while I was gone and by that second of the ten weeks that I would not be in Texas, that boyfriend was gone for good, and still we acknowledged nothing. We made plans for what we would do when we came back, movies we would watch together, places we would go, but nothing more. I would prove it, to her and to myself, I would tell her about girls I met on the road and I would pretend that there wasn’t an obvious reason why all of the stories I told her ended with but nothing happened, you know.

And everyone knew! I never even talked to them about it and they knew, Tony told me and my mom told me and Erin told me and I never brought it up around any of them. Tony knew when I would make phonecalls in every city that there was something I was more interested in than the new people I would meet, they all knew.

And after those ten weeks, it didn’t take any time at all. Less than a week before that kiss came right on time, and we even had time to panic afterward, to worry about whether or not we would be able to accept this because it would be so big and scary and serious, we even had time to worry and there would still be time. This would be life and there was time enough at last for all of it.

[the girl in question]
I’m writing this now at my desk and it’s the morning, the sun’s bright and she’s on the couch behind me, reading a book.

It’s not meant to be more than that all the time, and it’s all so natural, we can spend every waking moment together when we’re driving across the country for a couple weeks and we can just share space, she can read while I write and we don’t need anything more than to be in the same room.

[power play]
The point is this, all of this. The point is to have it all.

The point is that this is the only thing I’m any good at at all. That words are the only thing I’ve ever learned how to manage with any degree of skill. That the words I use can be used to tear down definitions and to build up new ideas about who I’m supposed to be. That words were what came out when I looked at myself in the mirror when I was eighteen and wondered if I had anything to offer anyone and when I didn’t know how to talk to myself. That words were what turned me into something I didn’t want to be and that words where what got me out of it. That words gave me power, that words are power, that we call it spelling because the act of naming something is magic, the act of turning it from a concept into something that can be controlled, modified, and beaten into the shape that we want it to take is an act that would have been understood to by mystical by anyone who did not have these experiences. That words turn life into story but they also turn story into life and that understanding that it happens is the key, not whether it’s right or wrong or even how to stop it.

The point is that it will happen again, that all of these truths are just true because I’m writing them down and if I lose these words then they must be re-learned, and that things are only written down so they can not be lost. That every work of literature is someone’s attempt to keep things from being lost.

The point is that there are some things that are bigger than words, and that words can not confine them, and that exploring what those things are is the only adventure left.

[not fade away]
I am not a creature of words, but sometimes I write to pretend that I am. I am more than the sum of what I give of myself through words, and you can have all of it.